Revitalizing the COH2 community?

Note: I posted this on Reddit first, a couple hours ago. I didn't get a decent response there. Thanks for taking the time to read, sorry if you've already seen this and ignored.

TLDR - do you think there's a way to revitalize the community, to bring in lapsed players and / or attract new players?

Hey everyone,

I'm an avid fan of Company of Heroes 2. I make no bones about it being my favorite game right now (not having played the first iteration, mind you) and, while I have a great time playing 1v1 and 2v2 games, I can't help but wish that there were more people both playing and in the community.

I try to check the # of active players of Company of Heroes and COH2 routinely when I play, and while it's heartening that the community doesn't appear to be shrinking (I routinely see around 5-6000 players during peak hours and 2000 players around 10PM EST when I play) this number is not... large. A bigger community would mean quicker matchmaking, and more close matches when matchmaking. It'd give me more people to shoot the breeze about COH2 with, and bring more mapmakers into the mix. Tournaments might even happen more often.

I know there has been quite a bit of controversy regarding the game, from the "BadComedian" review of the single player to diehard COH1 fans preferring the prequel (COH 1 population is usually roughly 1/2 of COH2 population when I check) and the game's combat model can take a bit of time to learn, but I humbly think there's a lot to love about this game.

I think the Battle Servers will increase the satisfaction of the current community, as the Workshop/mapmaking support did. I think that observer mode would help attract more interest in tournaments and livestreaming the game (again, perhaps mostly amongst the current crop of players) and keeping the game 'sticky' to current customers is a good thing. But what about actually gaining new players? The free weekend seemed to help somewhat, though I don't think the community is substantially larger than it was before. The 'rivalry' between Creative Assembly and Relic is entertaining, and will be good for viewership/game mindshare.

Do you have any thoughs? I'm not (necessarily) looking for game feature update suggestions, there's already plenty of talk about that. But I do love this game, and think it'd be better with more people queuing for matches.

Thanks for taking the time to read.

We're working on that buddy

how to make coh2 good: lower infantry HP, make cover give more modifiers

lower RNG across the board

cp2 russian elite troops

fix input delay for international players IE: euro vs australian

pay some youtube celebrity to play it, and put it on sale

gg

We actually debated that. The YT celeb thing. The original idea was to get some top level SC2 casters to play the game and stream it. But Lynx and I pushed to instead use that money to fly our community casters to Vancouver. Later some of that money ended up funding SNF.

But who knows, we may try something like that in the future.

how to make coh2 good: lower infantry HP, make cover give more modifiers

lower RNG across the board

cp2 russian elite troops

fix input delay for international players IE: euro vs australian

pay some youtube celebrity to play it, and put it on sale

gg

+1. concise and accurate

We actually debated that. The YT celeb thing. The original idea was to get some top level SC2 casters to play the game and stream it. But Lynx and I pushed to instead use that money to fly our community casters to Vancouver. Later some of that money ended up funding SNF.

But who knows, we may try something like that in the future.

Maybe a little less marketing and a little more fixing the game might be a better tactic?

Maybe a little less marketing and a little more fixing the game might be a better tactic?

Seriously. If there hadn't been so much bullshit in the balance (especially now) I bet there would be at LEAST 50-150% more players. I know I stopped playing when Tiger Ace came around. I caught some games today. FIRST FUCKING GAME TODAY WAS AGAINST A TEAM OF 3 FUCKING TIGER ACES. bullshit. Well I actually had one good game to end my night which I uploaded to the replays section of me fucking a Tiger Ace. I can sleep now.

You can't predict those numbers. Revitalizing this community might take more actions than just nerfing a certain doctrine.

Well for example I would like to see a better ladder system that incentivates players to play. Looking at Relic past games or looking at how other games do that (even better): giving players short term objectives and long term objectives in their ranked games will make them more motivated to play, even if they just want to have fun and not get the best in the world. (tip: it might be a good idea to investigate on how exactly the League of Legends league system works, imo it's the best you would find around)

Then, to enlarge the community and also increase the partecipation on tourneys I think it would be a good idea to start organizing tournaments based on people league (tourneys only for bronze,silver,gold,platinum..blablabla.. players) so that there would be a lot more competition and people would be more motivated to partecipate because they would feel they have a chance to win.

Another thing I would seriously look is the DLC business model: we can help Relic finding new ways to monetize the game, we want Relic to monetize the game and to succeed IF in return Relic would invest those money (or at least part of them) to improve the game. Look again at games like LOL or Starcraft, their focus on eSports gets them a lot of money: it's really all about the game YOU want to create and the direction YOU want it to take, we have very clear ideas of what we would like the game to be and the direction we would like it to take!

A healthy community grows around a healthy game with a healthy developer that shows the capacity of adapting to the challenges of the 2014 markets dominated by free to play games, even radically changing its business model. You make the game so you have that responsability at first and not the opposite (which is, on a side note, what I consider my personal biggest mistake with coh2.org, that tried to "force" Relic doing what we wanted).

Other aspects I would personally work on would be engine and graphics optimization: the most played games are so because they are pretty well optimized and they scale well with many PC configurations and they can work quite well also on laptops. We have seen no optimization patch for COH2 since the beginning and really I cannot believe that the Essence Engine 3 is just unoptimizable at all: you still didn't clear this point with anyone for now. You are closing the doors of your game to hundreds of thousands of players just for that (not to mention all those that play with Crossfire configurations who are still waiting for an official word if there will EVER be a patch to allow using multiple GPUs).

I would like to talk a bit also about the campaign, another aspect that has the potential to attract new players. First of all, I think that the RTS single player experience is one of the least profitable aspects of a game like COH. You spend millions of dollars but apart from the money you get from each sold copy there is no way to let it pay off during the lifetime (and, while not having any data here with me, I am naturally inclided to think you spend way more on the campaign that what you get in return, while you earn way more from the multiplayer aspect than what you initially invest thanks to the DLC system).

Unless...unless you are building a game like Starcraft and you create a big story that gets people more involved because the story extends among various titles: I bought SC2:HotS to know how the campaign was going to proceed, because it really involved me and got me curious. I would like to see the same on the COH franchise (it might be harder because we talk about history, but I'm sure it's not impossible and I'm sure it was totally doable creating a COH2 single player experience about Isakovich that would have continued in the next 2-3 expansions).

It also feels counter intuitive building a game that gets his money mostly from to the multiplayer aspect (that has its DLC model focused on that) but that also invests the least effort and money on the multiplayer in the development phase (I have no data again but due to the lack of pretty much every feature in the MP at launch, compared to at least a finished, variegate and complete single player campaign with many SP TOW missions, I could put my hand on fire about Relic spending more money on the SP than the MP).

Last thing (maybe it should have been placed above): you have to choose the right time to make these big changes. Now that the game is out the hype is pretty much over and even if you release the best patch ever you won't get the attention from the medias nor the chance to really get bigger. It's obviously the release of the first big expansion the moment where you should capitalize all your efforts to advertise all the cool new stuff I hope you are working on. Take advantage from the hype created by that, work on as many MP features you can and start talking about COH2 and eSports, organize big tourneys where everyone could have a chance to win, consolidate the relation with Twitch and try to get live events, keep the momentum each single week with new contests for fans that might be better at something else than just playing the game. Dedicate the biggest slice of the COH2 investment on MP and eSports because that's where I personally think the game could grow from.

Great post, Marcus!

Great post Marcus, regarding the SP experience and making people want to play (and buy) the next installment, that's the sort of thing I'd love to see. Sure, the end is obvious (Soviets win, Germans lose) but the sheer drama of the Eastern Front is something not to be missed. Hell, something like that I'd write myself if there was any interest at all in it. If I could get the damn world builder to run on my computer I'd make myself the maps as well.

does marcus get his COH2 PHD? he wrote a thesus and everything Kappa

I agree with what Marcus says here, Leagues would we god damn awesome!

Marcus realt hot the spot imo.

As for DLC i have no data to support this, but the pricing of dlc I feel is hurting the sales of the dlc. I am pretty sure that if prices went down a lot more players think that they could afford more commanders, or new players might join in because they feel that the monetary threshold is now lower. All in all I am pretty use that even if it will decreae revenue per sale, the total total revenue from sales would be higher because more ppl would buys tuff. How many bought a faceplate when that money could be spent on a commander?

What kept me playing some time before, was free content. I know you guys are running a business and can´t give everything new away for free. But I would think player numbers would go up again if you just released some new free commanders like the community defense commanders, German infantry commander etc. It doesn´t have to be big.

Also after some time with always the same units every game will come to the point where there´s nothing new. Adding even one new unit for everybody in a free doctrine (like the new, big Russian MG) could change that. Maybe a Su-100 or a Jagdpanzer IV doctrine.

Also after some time with always the same units every game will come to the point where there´s nothing new.

I dont think that can be a problem. coh1 is a great example of that.

I never understood why relic always seem to put most of their budget on singelplayer stuff.. i have never heard anyone buy company of heroes or recommend it to anyone for its singelplayer. Singelplayer is okay.. pretty fun but nothing that you stick around with and wait for expansions.

Multiplayer is where relic RTS games always shines and relic barely supports it. Just enough to prevent a riot. I mean with some good patching, optimization and a good expansion this game could easily have 30k+ concurrent players playing everyday. Then you create som kickass skinns and profit!

The game is great. IMO the talk of the game (not the gameplay) still suffers from the divergency between coh and coh2. "This game will never be as good as coh blablabla..." The game is great and should get more credit. But maybe its kind of hard to see that its great when youre fully occupied talking shit about it.

The game is great. IMO the talk of the game (not the gameplay) still suffers from the divergency between coh and coh2. "This game will never be as good as coh blablabla..." The game is great and should get more credit. But maybe its kind of hard to see that its great when youre fully occupied talking shit about it.

You do realise that a completely unsupported subjective opinion is worth close to 0 ,right?
I mean srsly go and check steamcharts , if all is nice and dundy how come coh2 numbers are THAT negligible ? Is it happening because most ppl at coh2(community) me included dont particularly like the game and influence everybody else likewise or is it because coh2 is a body of opinions that reflects the opinion of the general public about coh2 ( the game not the community )

+1 Marcus